Badge Keeper – Add achievements, retain clients

Badge Keeper capitalizes on Azure’s compatibility with AngularJS and jQuery to help companies improve client motivation and retention.

Retaining customers is always a difficult endeavor for any application service, especially so in the gaming industry. However, client motivation and retention is no longer a worry with Russian startup Badge Keeper’s new cloud-based application. The premium tool for software developers, Badge Keeper quickly adds achievement systems to mark goals, show progress, motivate clients, and improve retention rates. While badges are already an important tool for video game developers, Badge Keeper’s solution can be applied to any application. According to CEO Ilya Kivlev, “We are giving companies a tool to evaluate their retention problems and trends. Not a lot of companies have their own retention expert and many don’t know what to do to fix retention problems. We are trying to give them a tool to make the process simpler and easier.”

Badge Keeper provides prospective users with a wide array of tools designed to help companies retain clients and expand their business. In addition to improving client retention, Badge Keeper delivers flexible configuration on any gathered statistics, cross-platform achievements, and integrated analytics tools. The company also helps publishers and developers by organizing and analyzing the statistics, which saves time and money.

A Microsoft BizSpark member, Badge Keeper’s decision to rely on Azure for hosting was rooted in its reputation for usability and dependability says Kivlev, “It came to the point that our developer demanded that we use Azure. It has saved us tons of time and a lot of headaches. We have no performance issues with our server, which has been amazing to not worry about. We had never run into this high quality of a service before. Hosting our product is never an issue for us.”


Badge Keeper CEO, CEO Ilya Kivlev

CTO Alexander Pukhov adds, “We are always looking around to find ways to improve our product, but are never left wanting something Azure doesn’t provide. It’s a great product.”

In addition to hosting, Badge Keeper uses several other Azure features to enhance their product, including SQL Database, WebSites, Table Storage, and WebJobs. SQL Database is used for data protection and to improve scalability, while WebSites is used on both the front and back ends for its management and deployment capabilities. Badge Keeper uses Table Storage for quick data access and to store flexible data sets.

Badge Keeper’s decision to employ the Azure platform was also based on its ability to seamlessly integrate a variety of open source technologies, says Pukhov. “We rely on a lot of open source so, naturally, we needed a product that could handle our open source load. Azure has been nothing but dependable. Everything runs smoothly and we have suffered almost zero downtime.” Badge Keeper’s open source usage includes AngularJS to make the site a Single-Page-Application, Chart.js to display charts, FontAwesome to display icons, jQuery to simplify work with javascript, Prettify to highlight code, ImageProcessor to crop images and use filters, and Swashbuckle to provide a public API page.

Badge Keeper CTO, Alexander Pukhov

An excellent product and a BizSpark partnership have helped Badge Keeper reach out to new customers and expand their business, says Kivlev. “We have been with the BizSpark program for over a year and we have had no issues with the program or the products. The service has been great and the support level has been even better. Everything runs so great we have barely ever had to ask for support, but, when we have, responses have been awesome.”

Pukhov continues, “We didn’t have hands on experience in launching and marketing our product and we obviously needed to grow our user base. This is why we count on help from people like Microsoft. Having a name like theirs related to our companies is huge for us.”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program. To join or see other startup stories, visit us at our website here. To listen to our startups, check out these podcasts on devradio here

About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.